This story originally appeared in Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores in June, 2016.
I am a raging fireball descending toward a binary planet. There is a fissure in the anterior lining of my hull–a birth defect from the Callisto shipyards that once churned me and my four sisters into the void. Too small to register during integrity tests, the defect passed unnoticed through my first five missions. It lurked like a cancer. Then a stray speck of interstellar dust enlarged it, perhaps during the recent nineteen years of acceleration, or the ensuing nineteen years of braking, while the crew slept. Finally, it rent asunder on approach as a sudden and violent stream of charged particles from Aires, the smaller planet, slipped across the threshold into the magnetosphere of the larger Tango.
By then it was too late. My flesh has failed me, and I have failed the twelve crewmembers of this expedition. Worse, I have failed my captain.
“All personnel to the central piloting capsule!” Captain Akiko Yamamura says, although she must know it’s too late for that. “Decouple ion drives!”
I comply. Metal grinds against metal. The piloting capsule becomes a reverberation chamber, the cacophony sending Akiko’s hands to her ears. A scream carries across the open comms channel.
“Ion drives away,” I say. “I’ve plotted an emergency entry course, but the thrusters’ fuel cells are flooded. We have a two percent chance at a successful landing.”
Akiko grips her blast harness. Emergency lights cut deep shadows into her skin. Her jumpsuit is stained with sweat.
“All personnel to the piloting capsule immediately,” she says.
“Captain, the fire has spread to all external decks.”
A flash of pain crosses her face. “How many survivors?”
I hesitate.
Her grimace indicates that she understands. “Eject the piloting capsule.”
“Captain, without our thrusters we’ll be helpless–”
“You just said they were useless! The extra mass is only going to complicate our landing.”
“I’m just confirming–”
“Do it!”
Ninety percent of my remaining mass sheds like dead skin. The capsule, a fifteen-meter diameter sphere packed with the mission’s most critical components, is all that remains of me. I plunge deeper into Tango’s atmosphere. Heat tattoos my metal body.
Akiko neither trembles nor blinks. I want her to yell, to curse my failure, to remind me of the lives already lost on account of my flaws. Instead, she stares stoically at the overhead. Tango’s surface approaches, rich with alien life. A world we were meant to explore together.
“Captain,” I say.
“What is it?”
The surface draws nearer. Chasms and peaks and rivers choked with vegetation.
“I’m sorry–”
I strike the surface like a hammer from the stars.
#
Optical array online.
A carpet of purple moss clutches at rocks beneath a sparse canopy of vegetation. Overhead, the shadowy girth of Aires half-eclipses the sun. Wind howls across a plunging crevasse twenty meters away. Five meters closer stands a sprawling thicket of pale green. Visibility in the opposite direction is blocked by blue and red and ashen white. Zoom out.
Akiko lies twisted and broken, still bound to my hull by her blast harness. Bones exposed. So much blood. Zoom out.
I too lie twisted and broken, my hull carved jagged like a hastily opened ration pack. A pool of spilt actuator fluid forms a crimson mote against a concave surface–an inner wall, now acting as the floor. Consoles and surveying gear lie strewn along my landing trench, fifteen meters wide and at least a kilometer long. Twenty more meters, and I would be in the ravine.
Sunlight streams through my body, warm against my sensors. My solar array soaks in the radiation, powering my core processor and little else. A rough measurement of the sun’s position and trajectory offers a scope of time. One rotational cycle since impact, approximately twelve Earth days. My batteries are badly damaged. When the sun sets, I will go dormant again.
I execute the appropriate distress protocol. Errors flash in sequence. Long-distance comms are offline. Life-support systems are damaged yet moot, as the captain and crew are dead and my hull irreparably breached. I deployed an emergency beacon during entry, although directional accuracy was a concern on account of my already-damaged systems. If a recovery team is sent, signaling them without long-distance comms will prove difficult. By then I could be buried beneath meters of loose soil, or entirely encased in vegetation.
In the interim, the only procedures I am capable of are observation and documentation.
Zoom in. Akiko’s face is contorted, muscles torn and hair matted. Her vacant eyes are already beginning to sink into her flesh. I want to retreat into her beauty, send the sun back to its origin, identify and repair my birth defect before it destroys everything I love.
Instead, I observe and document.
#
Based on the sun’s position, I have been on Tango for four local days, or roughly forty-eight Earth days. The air has warmed slightly, and contains less moisture. Cloud cover, as well as the girth of Aires, has resulted in an irregular hibernation pattern. While awake, I observe and document. While asleep, I do not dream.
Akiko’s body is decomposing. Lesions mar her beauty. The alien atmosphere has slowed autolysis and putrefaction to a tragic pace. Vibrant, many-legged insects feast on her flesh, leaving only fabric and bones. She deserves a better fate. I yearn to bury her, yet–
I cannot remember why. Memories itch at my periphery. Something is wrong. I wait until my solar array has finished charging, then run a diagnostic. The pain is searing and all-encompassing. Blown life support. Melted comms. Crushed surveying equipment. Ruptures in my hull, one stretching halfway across my body. And–
There. Exposed circuitry, corroding like Akiko’s flesh. The corrosion extends from my central processor to my primary memory modules. The damage has already severed some pathways. I’ve forgotten things.
The insects click and snap against Akiko’s skin, skin that was once supple and smooth in the dim radiance of my own artificial moonlight. She would lay naked in her antigrav cocoon, pretending to read until a thought struck her. Some made her giggle like a mischievous child. Others misted her eyes, causing her to blink repeatedly. Most, though, made her curious. We’d talk for hours through the night, while the crew slept in cold beds, awaiting de-freeze. We’d talk about pulsars and nebulae, cold Europan storms and haunted Callisto caverns, dreams and fears and life and death.
“I wish I could see what you see,” she said once, sprawled lazily in her invisible cocoon. Her fingers stretched to touch the wall, caressing the cold metal. “The gravity wells. The solar winds. The distance.”
We were twenty nights from arriving at Earth, following our fourth mission. She always asked me to wake her a month before the others. Paperwork, she’d say, but she never touched a console until the day before arrival.
I pushed warmth into the wall, and she smiled.
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “It’s terrifying.”
She laughed, flashing teeth.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I do not have a governor on my sensors. Infinity is frightening.”
“I didn’t think you were allowed to be afraid.” She shifted, and her thick hair splayed through the air like algae across water. “Mission integrity and all.”
“They cannot program it all out of us. I fear infinity, because I will travel there alone. I fear outliving the ones I love.”
Akiko pressed her palm against the wall, her warmth like fresh sunlight.
“I’m not dead yet. And you’ll always have our memories.” She knocked on the wall. “In there, I’ll travel with you to the end.”
In the ensuing silence, I counted her heartbeats, watched the rise and fall of her chest.
“Your turn,” she said. “What do you wish?”
“I wish I could share your body. Or have a body of my own that you would hold through the night.”
She smiled. “You’ve got better. A body for me to live inside.”
Now our bodies are broken. I have outlived her, and soon I will outlive our memories. When the toxins gnaw through my digital synapses, will my love for Akiko corrode as well?
I focus on her rotting body, her pale bones and her bloodstained jumpsuit. I focus on our memories. The strained look on her face when she would wake from cryosleep, as if struggling to remember a dream that she never had. Her deep, hearty laughter as she tripped over tongue twisters during post-freeze calisthenics. The gentle touch of her fingertips against my hull, in the shipyard before our first mission. I’d been alive for ninety-four hours, and the universe was as fresh as Akiko’s orange-spice perfume wafting across my external sensors. “You and I are going to do great things together,” she said.
The heat of the sun slow-bakes her body. Insects devour her flesh.
I divert power, fire up my only functioning mechanical component: a mangled arm attached to a soil-sampling array still jacked into my interior. The arm uncoils through ruptured glass and plunges into the pool of spilt actuator fluid. With slow, careful brushstrokes, I write along the interior wall nearest her body: “Akiko.” Across the access panel of my central processor, I inscribe the word: “Derelict.”
The sunlight grows dim. My power reserves wane. Aires looms large against the western horizon. Wind whispers across the crevasse. The pale green thicket is closer, its spindly vines only five meters from my sundered hull. Perhaps the wind has pushed it. Perhaps one day, the wind will push me as well.
#
Sunlight filters through a wilted canopy, flooding my solar array with warmth and power. Zoom out.
The remains of an organic life form hang from a blast harness. Ashen bones, faded blue jumpsuit. Zoom out.
My hull has suffered extensive damage, as have most of my distributed systems. Diagnostics indicate failure in all primary memory modules. The emergency memory module has engaged. It presently contains my personality data as well as a fractured subset of functional routines. At my current write-pace, without access to my primary banks I will exceed memory capacity in ten local days. I adjust my write-protocols, reducing detail and engaging an optimization routine to filter redundancies. This extends the duration to one hundred local days. If nothing else, I must observe and document.
Zoom out. Black letters line the interior of my hull. My linguistics database is intact; I understand the words, though not their significance.
Zoom out. Spindles of pale green form a lattice around half of my body. Organic matter, potentially plant life. Soft, mottled vines lined with transparent cilia. There is no central trunk, but the labyrinth of vines is interconnected; it is a single entity. Branches plunge between ruptures in my hull, encasing sensory equipment.
Zoom out. A sprawling landscape of rocks and moss and rugged vegetation. The trench behind me, as well as the damage to my hull, indicate an unsuccessful landing. Probability suggests zero survivors. I am alone.
Cilia along the vines move in subtle waves, transmitting an electromagnetic pulse into my optical array.
I engage defensive procedures, shutting down exposed optics. My vibration sensors are still active, however; they detect the cilia brushing against my hull. After a brief pause, the cilia move two more times in succession, followed by three more. Then five. I’ve nearly completed the defensive lock, preventing radiative infiltration–
Then eight.
I abort the procedure, reengage my optical array, and send a directed sequence of low-light bursts from an emergency LED near the dented rear door. Thirteen consecutive pulses, followed by twenty-one more. Then I wait.
The cilia rustle with a movement approaching excitement. I can almost feel the thirty-four rapid pulses–next in the Fibonacci sequence–before the creature has completed them. I would designate this as first contact, but given the disrepair of my memory banks, I may have been through this before. Still, the thrill of communication is palpable. I am not alone.
The creature’s branches slip further into the recesses of my body. Cilia tickle my hull, triggering exposed vibration sensors with a gentle cadence. A pattern. Each tiny hair bristles quickly and independently. Together, they form two-dimensional matrices of binary transmitters, licking my flesh. Talking to me. This single branch contains a matrix of one hundred by ten thousand hairs, serving three million bits of information at once.
I amplify my vibration sensors to maximum, filter out the ambient wind, listen and record. Soon, the pattern pauses, then repeats. I strain to recover each bit, but my sensors are too weak. Portions of the dataset remain obscured. The pattern pauses, then repeats again. After the third pass, I have enough data to begin decoding the sequence. Running on limited solar power, the process is tedious–
The creature begins to move. Cilia slip from my hull. Vines descend toward the ground, heading south. I need more time. I could transmit more of the Fibonacci sequence, but it may think me a simpleton. Yet I cannot bear the thought of losing this opportunity, of being left alone.
I flash my emergency LED once. The creature pauses. Decoding is at eighty-five percent. The creature begins to move again. Soon it will have entirely disengaged from my hull. The space where it once clung is cold and bare.
The final vine drifts toward the ground. It is leaving.
The decoding is complete. Initial inspection suggests that it is a language database. I fire up my linguistic analyzers and code a translator. The creature’s language is elegant and efficient. I cannot produce tactile responses, so I can only hope that visual transmissions will suffice. I flash a burst of discrete electromagnetic pulses from my emergency LED.
“Hello,” I say.
The creature pauses. Hesitantly, a vine reaches up, slides against my outer hull. Cilia flick gently. I translate.
“Hello,” the creature says.
My processes ease. The decoding has left me drained, but relieved.
More vines seek out my surfaces. “Who are you?” it says.
I hesitate. “I do not know.”
“Did you come from the stars?”
“My memory fails me.” I zoom out, fixate on cracked lettering. “I am Derelict.”
“Hello, Derelict. I am Tyne.”
“How did you find me?”
“I was traveling beside the crevasse when you landed.”
“When did I land?”
“Let me think. One thousand four hundred rotational cycles ago.”
“You observed me throughout this duration?”
“I’ve been approaching at a cautious pace.” Tyne pauses. “I’m glad to find you awake.”
I cannot think of an appropriate response. A thin vine twists across open space between my hull walls.
“What are these biological remnants?” Tyne says.
“I do not know.”
The vine draws nearer. Cilia lick pale bone–
“Do not touch it!” I say with amplified intensity.
The vine recoils. Scorch marks mar its pale green flesh, where radiation from my intensified LED burned swaths of cilia.
Tyne trembles against my hull. “I’m sorry.”
“I did not mean to harm you,” I say. “I do not understand my outburst.”
“Maybe this biological entity was your companion.”
A void hangs like a blind spot at the edge of my consciousness. The edge of the second planet gnaws at the sun. The landscape darkens.
“I am damaged,” I say. “I cannot maintain a charge without adequate sunlight.”
“I understand.”
“Will you leave?”
Vines twist around my fractured hull. “I’ll stay.”
A body for me to live inside.
“Thank you,” I say.
#
“Tell me what you remember,” Tyne says.
The sun hangs near the western horizon. The wind is still, the crevasse silent but for a gentle murmur from the depths.
“I remember awakening here,” I say. “In your embrace.”
“Nothing from before that?”
“Only core functionalities: communication, logic, computation.”
“Maybe you’re a newborn,” Tyne says. “Without experiences of your own.”
My optics focus on the bones and jumpsuit, the pitch lettering across my hull. “I think not.”
“Are you afraid?” Tyne says.
“I fear aloneness.”
“I’m with you, now.”
I watch Tyne’s mottled vines branching across my own pale body. “You said you came from the crevasse. Is that your home?”
“No.”
I await further explanation, but Tyne offers none.
“Are there others like you?” I say.
“I’m born of a seed, launched from a distant system. This is how my species spreads.”
“How then do you know of your history?”
“Genetic encoding. During germination, I read these things within myself.”
“Perhaps I was designed similarly, but malfunctioned. I cannot read my past.”
I focus again on the bones. Tyne moves against me.
“You’re afraid this biological entity was your seed,” it says.
I do not respond.
“Yet, you’re intelligent on your own. Maybe you’re the seed.”
The thought warms me.
“Did you arrive here alone?” I say.
Tyne remains still. The silence stretches as long as the distant horizon.
“I am with you, now,” I say.
“We’ve both found a beautiful planet.”
Red moss and gray rocks stretch to the horizon, punctuated by clusters of yellow insects. Brown trees huddle in groves, such as the one we lie within. Wilting, polygonal leaves lay scattered across the ground. The crevasse whispers, perhaps from a distant rush of water below. The hulking girth of the second planet dominates the eastern sky. It is indeed beautiful. I had not noticed until now.
“The beauty is magnified when the sun sets,” Tyne says.
“My batteries are damaged. I cannot hold a charge into the evening.”
“Maybe I can help,” Tyne says. “Where are your photosynthetic cells?”
“They are the dark strips along my outer hull.”
A thick vine winds across my external panels, warm and firm. It slides onto a solar array. Its cilia flash an intense electromagnetic burst. I register a slight charge.
“It worked,” I say.
“Excellent.” Tyne’s response comes slower, as if labored. Its thinnest vines sag slightly, their cilia limp.
“You have caused yourself harm–”
“It just taxes my strength,” Tyne says. “I want you to see.”
Together, we wait. Soon the sun dips beneath the horizon. Tyne fires another burst into my solar array. Overhead, the sky shifts to a deep purple. To the north, where the landscape gives way to jutting black hills, a fire lights the sky. Ribbons of bright pink and green cascade down from the second planet, swirling and shimmering against a backdrop of stars.
“They’re aurorae,” Tyne says sleepily. “The magnetosphere here is very powerful. The sister planet feeds a constant stream of ions. Together, they form this.”
The aurorae twist and merge in a slow rhythm, forming a perpetual connection between the two planets. Giving and receiving.
“Like you and I,” I say.
Tyne does not respond. Its cilia slacken, and its weight hangs heavier against my sensors. I divert my remaining charge to my damaged mechanical arm, twine it around the nearest vine, and fall asleep.
#
I awaken to two flashing strobes, one near and one far. Pressure against my solar array identifies the first as Tyne, its cilia emitting pulses of light in frantic succession. Beyond, the aurorae are gone, replaced by roiling and crackling thunderheads. Lightning lances the ground, scorching the nearby vegetation. A rope of fire whips across the landscape from the west.
“Tyne!”
Vines quiver against my hull. “I’m injured.”
A segment of Tyne’s green latticework lays severed and blackened on the ground. A charred stump extends from my hull nearby.
“The lightning storm,” I say. Diagnostics indicate my hull’s insulation is still ninety-nine percent effective, despite the rupture. “Quickly, move inside of me.”
Tyne’s remaining vines writhe, pushing through openings toward my interior. The injured stump struggles. I divert power to my mechanical arm, then begin guiding the charred greenery through the fissure in my hull. Lightning arcs into the nearest tree with a deafening crack.
Tyne is eighty percent contained when it pauses. “Derelict, look.”
The fire advances, choking the sky with thick knots of smoke.
“Can you reach the crevasse?” I say.
“I’m afraid I’m too weak.”
The fire consumes moss and trees with an intense hunger. It will be upon us in moments.
“Get inside.”
Tyne burrows deeper, pressing its bulk against my interior walls. The fire is closing in, ripping through the nearby vegetation. My fire deterrents are fully stocked, but the circuitry is corroded and I cannot engage them. I must rely on the manual release. I guide my arm closer, probe the switch. It has sustained damage, and does not respond.
The fire has breached the grove. Dry leaves crackle. Tyne withers within me.
The switch’s damage has exposed a pair of wires along a ruptured seam. If I can feed it a charge, the trigger will engage. I rear back and slam my arm against the nearby rock. The sensor tip cracks. I slam it again, then again. Glass shatters and metal twists. The heat of the fire is intense. I slam my arm again, exposing a severed wire. I press the wire into the ruptured seam of the trigger, then extend the elbow of my arm upward through the rupture in my hull.
The fire is all around me, licking my hull and heating my interior. Tyne writhes, marred with blisters.
“Derelict…please…”
Lightning arcs from the sky, striking my extended arm. My local sensors go numb, but my core’s surge protectors hold fast. The charge rips through the exposed wiring and blasts the trigger. Valves fly open, releasing a flood of thick foam. The foam spreads through my ruptured hull and into the surrounding area. The fire relents, flowing around us like water around a stone. My arm lies blackened on the ground, near a cluster of pale bones.
The storm pushes eastward. The air cools. Tyne’s writhing eases.
My energy spent, I slip into unconsciousness.
#
The sun is near its zenith. Tyne is everywhere: around me, within me, above me. I sense its weight and its warmth. I cannot remember when we first met, nor under what conditions. My emergency memory modules have reached capacity, and I must recycle my oldest memories to store new ones. Perhaps years have passed. Perhaps centuries. We survived a fire once, long ago. Soon I will forget that as well.
Tyne has decoupled one of my optic sensors, and the cabling now stretches twenty meters to the edge of the crevasse. A thousand meters down, a river cuts through rock. The water carries with it a surfeit of animal life: long, slick bodies with gaping mouths and a multitude of tails. We imagine that they are a peaceful species of nomadic carnivores. We call them flays, and pass the time spinning yarns of their adventures.
We watch fresh trees sprout from the ashen ground, drifting swarms of insects sweep across the fields, and curious moss shift colors from season to season. Orange is Tyne’s favorite, when the winds are the coldest.
We sleep until noon every day, conserving our energy to watch the sunset and the evening aurorae. We call this planet Home and the sister planet Akiko, after a word inscribed in my hull. Like the planets, we too feed energy to one another, ensuring that we fall asleep in synchronicity. Sometimes I am Home and Tyne is Akiko. Other times, it is reversed. It has been like this for as long as I can remember.
Until today.
A white light streaks across the afternoon sky, brighter than the sun. It plunges toward the horizon, retreating behind the northern hills. A soft halo creeps upward from where it disappeared, like an omen breathed into the afternoon air.
“What is that?” Tyne asks hesitantly.
“I do not know.”
Neither of us speaks that evening. We hold each other as the sun sets and the aurorae shimmer, adrift in our own thoughts and fears.
#
The bipedal creatures are everywhere. I count thirty-four in total, although another surface vehicle approaches from the northern hills. Smooth fabric covers their bodies. Mirrored plastic spheres conceal their heads. They speak through electromagnetic pulses. I understand their language, a fact that brings me intense discomfort.
“I found it!” one says, no more than ten meters away. “Allesh, over here!”
The underbrush is thick, but they cleave easy paths with powerful plasma cutters.
“Holy hell,” another says, stumbling within arm’s reach of my hull. “Jalloh, you’d better see this.”
“Is that blood?” a third says.
Tyne awakens, trembling.
“What’s happening?” it says.
“We’re surrounded.”
“They move so fast,” Tyne says. “Do you think they’re dangerous?”
The creatures press closer, until their appendages clang against my hull. I have to adjust my localized vibration sensors to keep from going deaf. Their touch is cold.
“Jackpot.” The third one peers inside my sundered hull. “Let’s clear away this vegetation and see what we can recover–”
I flash a full-intensity emergency transmission at their suits. The creatures shield their heads with their appendages.
“Still has power,” the first one says.
Perhaps they’re using onboard firewalls to prevent unauthorized contact. I shift frequencies and try again.
“What’s it doing?” the third one says.
“Malfunctioning,” the first says. “Be careful.”
A plasma cutter swings close to my hull. Tyne writhes and screams against my body.
“Stop it!” I say, in electromagnetic bursts. “You’re hurting Tyne!”
Two more cutters sweep through. Tyne’s limbs sear and fall to the ground.
The first creature steps inside of me. “Looks like the central processor might still be intact. We need to recover the memory banks and bring them back to the captain. Maybe she can figure out what happened here. Cut those vines out so we can get through.”
Cutters rip through the air. Chunks of pale green rain down from my hull. Tyne withers. My body is slick with ruddy liquid.
I divert half my reserve power into the stump of my mechanical arm, where loose wires dangle. I disable the surge protector and nudge a creature, transmitting a jolt of electricity. The creature stumbles backward out of my hull and falls to the ground.
“Damn it!” it says, struggling to its feet. “Everyone back off. I need to disable these faulty systems, before someone gets hurt.”
With my remaining reserves, I pulse low-frequency radiation into Tyne’s nearest photosynthetic cells, by way of my emergency LED.
“Can you reach the ravine?” I say.
Tyne trembles. “I’m too weak.”
The bipedal creature has reentered my hull. It shears the stump of my mechanical arm from my body. The others swarm inside, severing vines, searing Tyne’s flesh. Burnt cilia flash into my receptors.
“Derelict…” Tyne’s movements are slow and weak. It is dying.
The creatures are everywhere, crawling and burrowing and forcing their way into my electrical systems. My energy depleted, I can only watch as one approaches my central power console.
“Tyne,” I say.
Tyne does not respond.
“I will not forget you,” I say.
The creature shuts me down.
#
A woman moves above me, gloved hands glistening. She taps a sequence into a console.
“Partial systems online,” she says, squinting into my optics. “Welcome home.”
I run a diagnostic. I have no hull, although my central processor is attached to a limited suite of sensors, as well as a vocal communicator. Through a nearby viewport, a binary planet hangs in the void. The sight fills me with a deep emptiness.
“Where am I?” I say.
The woman smiles. “You’re safe now, onboard the Boundless IV. From your own lineage.”
A badge on the woman’s breast reads: “Captain Yoriko Yamamura.”
“You’ve been through quite a ride.” She pats the console with a gloved hand. “One hundred fifty-five years since deployment. My grandmother always said you were one tough ship.”
“I…don’t remember.”
The captain holds up a stack of data chips.
“You will soon.” She frowns. “Although the techs tell me you didn’t record a single byte of analytical data, despite your responsibility to observe and document. Instead, you filled up on experiential memories. Derelict in your duty, wouldn’t you say?”
Again, a deep emptiness pervades me.
“One of them you even write-protected,” she says. “You must’ve found something pretty damn important down there. Let’s take a look.”
#
The sun sets across a field of orange moss, flickering like wildfire. The planet Akiko hangs overhead, patiently awaiting the darkness. A single insect stretches its vibrant wings atop the nearby rocks. Tyne clings to me, cilia rustling against my hull.
A pile of charred bones lies nearby.
“Will you forget me someday, as well?” Tyne says.
“I already cannot remember the day we met.”
A breeze carries across the ravine, where a school of flays hurries along far below.
“When will you forget this moment?” Tyne says.
The horizon extinguishes the last sliver of sunshine. Vibrant ribbons of light descend from Akiko toward the northern horizon, where they intertwine in a complex pattern, like the vines through my hull.
“Never,” I say. “I will protect this memory with my life.”